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YES Summit wrapup The technological twist

AUSTIN, Texas (12/12/07)--The Credit Union National Association's (CUNA) YES (Your Essential Strategies) Summit: Serving 18-to-30s ended as it began--and as it ran--with a technological twist. The intent of the event, held last week in Austin, Texas, was to explore how credit unions can design financial products and service delivery to match young adults’ financial behavior and preferences.

Philip Heckman, right, CUNA's director of youth and young adults programs, crosses the finish line first in competition with fellow YES Summit blogger, Christopher Morris, web manager for the CUNA Councils, to see who can post items from the summit faster. (Photos provided by CUNA)

Summit attendees registered for the YES CU Community on site.

YES Summit attendee Debs McCrary with her new iPod Touch.

To help attendees understand the 18-to-30 mindset, the summit agenda immersed them in young adults’ online culture, according to Josh Jones, CUNA’s manager of young adult services. “We opened with an announcement of our live conference blog, which featured posts of all sessions within minutes of completion,” said Jones. “We topped that with an announcement of the YES CU Community, a social network website designed to give credit union people a forum to discuss ways of better serving 18-to-30s.” The YES CU Community allows individuals interested in this member demographic to register and create personal profiles. This makes it possible for them to connect with their credit union peers based on common interests, such as having marketing or lending responsibilities, or working for a university credit union. “The purpose of an online social network,” Jones said, “is to stimulate the exchange of ideas among members. The challenge is to attract enough participants to generate self-sustaining conversations. There’s no magic number for this critical mass of participation, but our goal was to get all 108 summit attendees to register before the conference was over.” YES Community registration is open to everyone associated with the credit union movement. At press time, membership stood at more than 175, reflecting an interest beyond the Austin group. A drawing for an iPod Touch on the summit’s last day served as an incentive to register for the network. Philip Heckman, CUNA’s director of youth and young adults programs, chose the prize winner using an online random number generator. “Given how tech savvy Generation Y is, there was no way we were going to decide the prize winner by drawing a slip of paper out of a hat,” Heckman said. The computer algorithm chose number 67, and Debs McCrary, a member of the board of San Antonio FCU, claimed her prize. In a comment she posted in a YES CU Community discussion group later, McCrary thanked CUNA for the iPod and disclosed that both her son and daughter had generously offered to relieve her of the burden of filling its eight gigabytes of musical storage space.